by Alex George
—
AT THE END OF most days I would climb onto my bike and ride home, although sometimes my mother would come and collect me. She sat in the car, ready with a bright smile and a wave when I came out of the gates.
“How come you never go and see Dad when you pick me up?” I asked her one evening as I shoved my bike into the trunk.
She shrugged. “No need. I know where he is.”
“Don’t you miss him?”
“I miss him like crazy, Robert.”
“So you could go and talk to him.”
My mother looked straight ahead as she put the car in gear and pulled out into the stream of vehicles crawling toward the exit. “Yes, well,” she said. “I want to give him the time he needs to work things out.”
“What is there to work out?”
“While your brother was alive, Dad always insisted that Liam’s life wasn’t too short—that it was exactly the length it should be. But when we were in the hospital that last time, he realized he had been wrong. I think that made everything much worse for him. God gave me the strength to cope with the pain, but I don’t think your father was ready for it. So try not to be mad at him. He misses Liam, that’s all.”
“What about me? Doesn’t he miss me, too?”
My mother was silent for a moment. “Dad’s heart is broken right now,” she said. “He’s just trying to mend it.”
“Is your heart broken, too?” I asked.
“Oh, Robert. All these questions.”
We drove in silence for a while. Finally my mother started to talk again.
“There was nothing your father could do to stop Liam from dying,” she said. “Not one thing. That was almost impossible for him to live with. He had to watch him get sicker and sicker, and then die.”
“We all did.”
“Yes, but it was especially hard for him. He wanted to protect his son. He thought that was his job. And when he couldn’t, he felt like it was his fault.”
“Of course it wasn’t his fault.”
“No, it wasn’t. But sometimes that can be hard to see. You’ll be a father one day, Robert, and then you’ll understand.” My mother paused. “Dad used to talk about being a superhero, about putting on a cape and battling the forces of evil to protect his family.”
“What was his superpower?”
She looked at me and smiled. “Love, of course. Nothing in the world is stronger than that.”
—
THE FOLLOWING EVENING Nathan and I lingered in the parking lot, watching Faye as she milled around with her friends. That night, for the first time, she was carrying a guitar case. Nathan groaned in bewitched anguish.
“I bet she’s going to play it on the beach,” he breathed. “We have to go and listen!”
“Those kids aren’t going to want us around,” I said.
“We won’t go with them,” said Nathan. “We can just follow them and watch from a distance.”
I shook my head. “Let’s go and do something else.” We had always stayed away from the nightly beach parties—we were too young to hope for an invitation. Besides, I wasn’t sure that either of us really wanted to know what went on down there.
“But what if she never brings her guitar again?” said Nathan.
I sighed. It was the night of my mother’s weekly Bible study class, and she would not be getting back until late. I had no reason to hurry home.
We took a circuitous route to the beach that involved elaborate detours and much doubling back. The parties always happened at the same spot, close to the path that led through the sand dunes from the beach parking lot. The place was easily identified by the charred embers of nightly bonfires, the scattered army of cigarette ends half-buried in the sand, and the occasional empty can of Pabst that somebody had left behind. We found a sand dune some thirty yards away and hunkered down, out of sight.
By the time we arrived, the sun had vanished behind the trees to the west, and the night’s festivities had already begun. We peered cautiously over the top of the sand dune. A small fire had been lit, and we could see the happy faces of the partygoers glowing in the flickering flames. Most of the kids were sitting cross-legged on the sand, smoking cigarettes and passing around a bottle. Faye sat in the middle of the crowd, languidly strumming her guitar as she chatted to the girl next to her. The chords floated into the air, clear and pretty. Nathan did not take his eyes off Faye, but I was watching Hollis Calhoun, who was sitting with his back to us. He was his usual brutish self, shouting and laughing too loudly.
After fifteen minutes, I was starting to get cold. The wind had begun to whip in off the ocean. Nothing much was happening on the beach. I don’t know quite what I had been expecting, but I was disappointed to discover how boring it was to watch teenagers smoke and drink.
“Let’s go,” I whispered.
Before Nathan could reply there was a smattering of whoops and applause. Everyone turned toward Faye and grew quiet. She gave her audience a shy grin and then began to play. I recognized the picked arpeggios of the introduction to “Scarborough Fair.” When she began to sing, her voice was breathy, low, and beautiful. Some of her audience swayed gently in time to the music, but neither Nathan nor I moved a muscle. We were both hypnotized. When she sang,
Remember me to one who lives there
He once was a true love of mine
Nathan closed his eyes and let out a small groan of helpless desire. At the end of the song the group around the fire cheered and clapped while Faye lowered her eyes modestly to the ground. I turned toward Nathan. He looked thunderstruck.
“Nathan? Are you all right?”
He stared back at me. “We should go now,” he said.
We made our way back to our bikes without saying another word.
—
WHEN I ARRIVED HOME, my father’s station wagon was parked in its usual spot in the driveway.
“Dad!” I yelled as I unlocked the front door. “Are you home? It’s me!”
The house was completely quiet.
“Dad?” I called out.
Finally I heard the slow thud of footsteps, and then my father appeared in the doorway to the sitting room. He was carrying a pile of six or seven books.
“Hello, Robert,” he said.
“Are you looking for Mom?” I said. “Because she’s not here. She’s—”
“At Bible study,” said my father. “Yes, I know.”
Whatever vague hopes had been swirling around inside me evaporated in an instant. Of course my father had known that my mother wouldn’t be there. That was precisely why he had come. He hovered awkwardly in the doorway, not looking at me. “I really just came to get some books to read,” he said.
I took the top book off the pile he was carrying. On the cover was a picture of a woman in a purple crinoline dress. She was standing alone in the middle of a cornfield. Her face was turned away, and she appeared to be gazing at something just beyond the horizon. The title was printed in a dramatic, curlicued font across the stormy sky.
“Desires of the Duchess,” I said. It was by one of my mother’s favorite authors, V. V. St. Cloud. I turned the book over and read the synopsis on the back cover. There were passionate lady aristocrats, swarthy plebeian heroes, and lashings of unspeakable villainy. “Doesn’t seem like your usual thing,” I said. When my father picked up a book, which wasn’t often, they tended to be blockbusters as fat and heavy as bricks, usually by James Clavell or Harold Robbins.
“It’s not,” agreed my father. “But there’s not much to do in the office late at night, so I thought I would expand my literary horizons.”
“You could always come home,” I said. “That way you wouldn’t have to sneak in and out of your own house, stealing Mom’s books.”
My father’s face looked pained. “Don’t be mad at me, Robert,” he said.
I climbed off Liam’s bed and walked into the living room. There were still several V. V. St. Cloud novels on the shelves. The books all appeared to be similar to Desires of the Duchess, in that they were historical romances set in England, although the time period varied. One took place during the Blitz in London—love flourished among the ruins as enemy bombs rained down on the devastated city, the book jacket screeched—and the earliest I found told of the tempestuous affair between one of the knights of the Round Table and a buxom serving wench. I finally picked one called Star-Crossed. I’d hoped it might be a tale of intergalactic romance, but on the cover there was a picture of a woman standing in the middle of a deserted stage. I took it back to my room and started to read.
I didn’t move for the next six hours.
TWENTY-TWO
Star-Crossed begins in a remote part of Northern England in 1821. The heroine, Betsy Cribbins, is nineteen years old. She works as a scullery maid in a large country house. Not even the ugly uniform that she wears every day can hide her ravishing beauty, which V. V. St. Cloud took several pages to describe in rapturous, overwrought prose. It’s hardly surprising that she attracts a lot of unwanted attention. She has to fend off everyone from the chauffeur to visiting viscounts who have been at the port bottle after dinner. Luckily she is quick on her feet and can outrun most of her assailants, especially the drunk ones. While Betsy works long hours in the kitchen and keeps an eye out for horny footmen and dukes, she is quietly nurturing a secret dream: she longs to find fame and fortune on the stage in London. Sometimes she creeps into the library late at night and borrows leather-bound volumes of plays by Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Marlowe, which she reads hungrily, imagining herself playing the female leads. These fantasies sustain her as she scours the kitchen flagstones.
Enter Roger Fortescue-Pemberton, the eldest (and very handsome) son of the family, who has returned to the estate from London, where he is a successful lawyer. One night, after the rest of the household has gone to bed, Roger discovers Betsy in the library, pulling a copy of The School for Scandal off the shelves. The scene that followed was gripping and tense, all the more so because I didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on. The prose was so bafflingly opaque that it was only several pages after Betsy had been left on the floor with her maid’s uniform torn in several places that I realized what had happened. Betsy creeps back to her room, packs her belongings into a small bag, and quietly leaves the house. Her shame pursues her out the door.
Betsy uses the last of her savings to travel to London and makes her way to Drury Lane, home of the city’s most famous theater. There she auditions for a part in a new production of Romeo and Juliet and—improbably, in my opinion—wins the role of Juliet. The theater owner, a man called Collins, finds a place for Betsy to stay in Shoreditch. Rehearsals begin. Things are looking up.
And then disaster strikes. Betsy falls hopelessly in love with Percy Rylance, the actor playing Romeo. Percy has eyes of dazzling blue and a roguishly strong chin (whatever that meant). Betsy longs for Percy but is too scared to tell him how she feels. Instead she hides her feelings behind frosty indifference. And she is right to be cautious: Percy clearly dislikes her as much as she adores him. At the end of each scene they rehearse, he coldly turns away from her.
Betsy forges bravely on, her broken heart heavy inside her. The opening night of the play is a stunning success. The audience loves her. There are multiple curtain calls. Flowers are thrown onto the stage. As the curtain descends for the final time, Percy storms off the stage. In what should be her moment of triumph, Betsy is desolate. She is weeping in her dressing room when Mr. Collins knocks on the door. He strokes her hand and offers to drive her back to Shoreditch in his carriage. Betsy gratefully accepts.
I was as naïve as Betsy. Only when Collins pushes her through the door of her lodgings and throws her down onto the bed did I realize what was going to happen next.
When Betsy arrives at the theater the following day, she is dead inside. That night her performance is more spellbinding than ever. As she stares into Percy’s eyes, she can still feel Collins’s sour breath on her neck, his knuckles against her skin.
Afterward Collins comes into her dressing room again. With an ugly leer, he explains how things are going to be from now on. Betsy will do whatever he demands of her, or he will throw her back out onto the street. She has no choice but to comply with his disgusting demands. And so she shuttles between the adoration of the public and the humiliations that Collins inflicts upon her in private. (By this stage I was getting more adept at parsing V. V. St. Cloud’s elaborate circumlocutions, but there were still times when I was left scratching my head.)
Some weeks later, Betsy is waiting in the wings for her opening scene when, to her horror, she sees none other than Roger Fortescue-Pemberton sitting in one of the theater’s boxes. She can feel his eyes on her throughout the play. After the final curtain Betsy returns backstage and waits for Collins. When she hears the knock on the door, Betsy braces herself—but it is not Collins! It is Roger Fortescue-Pemberton! He is warm and charming, showering her with compliments, and of course he is as handsome as ever. Betsy realizes that Roger does not recognize her as the lowly scullery maid he so casually took advantage of months earlier. Just then, the door opens and Collins stands at the threshold, staring in fury at the unexpected intruder. The two men face off against each other. Collins is growling and ferocious, a bulldog. Fortescue-Pemberton is arrogant and aloof. Words are exchanged. Insults are hurled. Before Betsy can stop them, they are marching outside to the alleyway behind the theater to settle their fight. It’s a duel!
(By now I was turning the pages so fast that I didn’t stop to consider the improbability of all this. Where, for example, had the guns come from?)
Death, at least, was rendered in more straightforward prose than sex. Two pages later, the evil Collins is lying in the gutter, a crimson bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. It turns out that Fortescue-Pemberton is a marvelous shot. He dusts off his evening dress, bows deeply toward Betsy, and hands her the gun before he turns to go. Betsy is left alone in the alleyway, the corpse of her tormentor at her feet.
Moments later (wouldn’t you know it) a policeman walks by. He sees the dead man and Betsy with the gun in her hand. She is arrested and locked up in Pentonville prison and charged with murder. The newspapers are full of the scandal.
The day of the trial arrives. Betsy sits in the dock, her hands shackled. Imagine her horror (and mine) when the counsel for the prosecution walks into the courtroom—it’s none other than Roger Fortescue-Pemberton! Betsy watches numbly as the man who murdered Collins constructs the case against her for that very crime. She knows that if she shouts out the truth, nobody will believe her in a million years.
It takes the jury less than an hour to reach its verdict. The foreman declares her guilty, and then the judge gravely sentences her to death by hanging. Then a most peculiar thing happens. As Betsy is lifted to her feet by the prison warders, Roger Fortescue-Pemberton jumps to his feet and announces that his conscience will not allow him to watch an innocent woman go to the scaffold in his place. In front of an electrified courtroom, he confesses to the murder!
A week later, Betsy is a free woman, but she is unable to stop thinking about Roger Fortescue-Pemberton. Finally she goes to visit him in prison. Betsy sees the remorse in his face and decides that this man is not so bad.
By this stage even I could see what was going to happen next.
In the weeks leading up to Fortescue-Pemberton’s execution, Betsy visits him every day. They sit surrounded by villains and brigands, aware that their time together is impossibly short. Their love is fierce and unco
mplicated, seasoned by the tragedy that they both know lies ahead. Nothing will stop the slow march of days toward the hangman’s noose.
Betsy attends the execution. She can barely watch as Roger climbs the wooden stairs of the scaffold. Just before the canvas hood is pulled down over his head, he looks at her and gives her a brave smile. It is the memory of that smile that she treasures the most. It is all that she has left.
But in fact it is not quite all. A week later Betsy learns that Roger has left her enough money to buy a small house and to provide a decent income for the rest of her life. She moves to a small market town in Kent, mercifully far from the public eye. There is a degree of solace in the unchanging peace of her days, and her broken heart slowly heals. Her sadness is sweetened by the knowledge that she has been deeply and ardently adored.
As I turned the final page I let out a sigh of relief. The book was a symphony of powerful human emotion and I was wrung out, overcome, exhausted. Then I saw a single word on the next page: EPILOGUE.
V. V. St. Cloud had saved the best for last.
Many, many years later, Betsy receives a letter from Percy Rylance. Percy has become one of the most famous actors in England, thanks in no small part to the notoriety caused by Collins’s murder behind the Drury Lane theater all those years before. Percy begs her to come and visit him in London. There is, he writes, something he must tell her.
Betsy is intrigued but apprehensive. She takes a coach into the city. Percy lives in a large town house in Bloomsbury. When she sees him, Betsy is unable to hide her shock. He has become an old man. His hair has fallen out, his skin is lined and gray.
Percy tells her that he is dying. And death, he says, makes you understand that there’s no time left for regret. Now that I’m too ill to work, he says, my head is no longer full of other people’s lines. And I realize that I have my own story that needs to be told.
